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2005 Giro d’Italia, Stage 19

Ah yes, the Giro. With all its wonderful fireworks, trials, tribulations, glory and anguish. This was the exciting race to watch when we endured the rather boring years of Juan Pelota’s dominance in the Tour. Yeah, I said it.

The penultimate stage of the 88th Giro d’Italia celebrates the Olympic Valleys of Sestrieres that will host the 2006 Winter Olympics and the riders who take the start will celebrate a world of pain. Starting in Savigliano south of Torino, Stage 19 makes a long, gradual 45km climb up to Sestrieres after 101km. After a long descent to Susa, the final 45km of this stage is simply brutal. The never-before used climb of the Colle della Finestre is a 18.5km monster, with an average gradient of 9.2%. Said to be harder than the Passo Gavia, the final 7.9km of Finestre is on a gravel “strada bianca” that will make the the climb even more difficult. Once over the Finestre, there’s another descent and the final 12km climb back up to Sestrieres.

Video of the final, unpaved, kilometers of the Colle delle Finestre during the 2005 Giro d’Italia. This was the first year the road was used in the Giro. The video is a re-broadcast by SPORZA so it is not in English but definitely worth watching for the action and scenery.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure.
Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

…you’re jacked out of your mind on natural adrenaline yet your body responds to even more oxygen because of the epo/blood doping/what ever the fuck has been your choice…

…you’re hammering up a hard pack dirt road in some of the most glorious countryside in the world with the best riders imaginable…you’re focused, you’re pumped, you’re flying uphill beyond reason…

…people are lining an already narrow road turning it into an almost impossible passageway while they shake their fists inches from your face as they literally scream inane shit at you & yet you all but ignore it as you drive yourself to the top, knowing full well that with little respite other than perhaps a moment to stick a bit of newspaper under your kit, you’re about to fly downhill at insane speeds, your very life held in place by technology & physics…

…the color, the spectacle, the history, the grandeur…there’s the camaraderie between fans, the bond between riders despite the competition…the overall feeling of “we’re all in this together”…

…absolutely awesome, crazy shit, day after day after day…hey, it’s fucking grande, it’s time for il giro…

That looks like some of the crazy shit we ride here in Colorado. We are hoping the Pro Challenge will include roads like that. Old Monarch Pass, Cottonwood Pass, and more. Pikes Peak would have been amazing but not this time.